Mrs Dalloway As a War Machine. An Introduction

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to show why and how Virginia Woolf´s novel is a powerful agency of social intervention which disrupts our programmed capacity to read and to look. Manuel Asensi discusses four elements of the context in which it was written; The period of writing and publishing, between 1922 and 1925, a time of vanguardisms; the influence of the Bloomsbury group; the outbreak of the First World War, which situated this pacifist group in a marginal position; and the biological condition of Woolf, being not only a woman, but one who suffered from a psychological disorder. Secondly, the article proposes an analysis of the novel´s characters in three groups; those who delimit the territory; others who represent lines of escape and, finally, Clarissa, who finds herself somewhere in between. A difficult position, since she does not know where she belongs; at the same time he is both inside an outside of the order.